3quarksdaily

Look Who's Talking: The Turing Test's 3,000 Year History - And My Proposed Modification

by Richard Eskow

In his famous experiment, Alan Turing pictured somebody talking with another person and a computer, both of which are out of sight.  If they're unable to tell the computer from the human being, the machine has passed the "Turing Test."  But here's a question for a human or a machine to answer:  Why did Turing pick speech as his proof?

The Test is usually described as way to determine whether a computer has achieved consciousness, but Turing's original framing was more subtle.  "I believe (the question of whether machines can think) to be too meaningless to deserve discussion," he wrote.  "Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."

Now, that's interesting:  Not only did Turing choose good conversation as a valid substitute for proof of machine "thought," but he then added an implied proof - based on what people say.  If people say machines "think," then they do think.  If people say they're conscious, then they are conscious. 

Why such an emphasis on speech - the machine's, and our own?  The idea that language, words, and names are a measurement of consciousness goes back at least 3,000 years, to the Tower of Babel story from the Book of Genesis. "And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech," it says, "and they said ... let us build us a city and a tower ... and let us make us a name."  You know what happens next:  "And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one  ... now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do."  The great tower, that literal Hive Mind with its worldwide common language (HTML?), came crashing down.  The lesson?  Language and knowledge equal personhood, but too much equals Godhood.

People could create artificial life in the ancient texts, too - but their creations couldn't speak.  In the Talmud, Rabbah makes an artificial man that looks just like the real thing, but a shrewd scholar - one Zera, who I picture as looking like Peter Falk in Columbo - administers a Turing Test and the creature flunks:  "Zera spoke to him, but received no answer. Thereupon he said unto him: 'Thou art a creature of the magicians. Return to thy dust.'"

Flash forward to the 1600's and Descartes, who wrote in Discourses On the Method:  "If there were machines which bore a resemblance to our bodies and imitated our actions as closely as possible for all practical purposes, we should still have two very certain means of recognizing that they were not real men. The first is that they could never use words, or put together signs, as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others."

I don't know Descartes if read the Talmud, but he claimed to be religious and even wrote an ontological argument for the existence of God (if not a very convincing one).  There's no question he read Genesis, as well as many other papers, poems, and stories derived from these ancient texts and legends. 

Did Turing read Descartes?  We don't know - but we can be pretty sure he saw another work:  Boris Karloff's Frankenstein.  The monster, who was eloquent in Mary Shelley's book, was mute in the movie.  Whether or not the film makers were echoing these ancient stories, they'd undoubtedly seen the 1920 German film The Golem (see above), based on a folktale derived from the Talmud passage about the wordless "man" made of dust.  The Golem story spread in the shtetls of Eastern Europe during the 18th Century at the same time the Frankenstein story was written. They may both have stemmed from the same fear - that humanity's industrial advances were bringing us to a new Babel even as new medical discoveries invaded God's turf.

I'm not a big fan of the Turing Test (which is analyzed in detail here).  I'm sympathetic to the Chinese Room argument that you can replicate speech without creating the sentience behind it.  I lean toward the idea that most speech is just an output for the human species, the way honey is for wasps or webs are for spiders.  My first mother-in-law could weave something that looked like a spiderweb, if you asked her nicely, but that didn't make her an arachnid.  So if we build an AI - or meet an alien, for that matter - that can speak like a human being, I still won't be completely convinced it has consciousness like ours. 

Which gets us to singing.  Its main evolutionary purpose seems to be attraction - either sexually, or as a way of establishing trust.  Daniel Levitan suggests that singing might have been used to convey honesty when a stranger approached a new community, because the emotion conveyed  is more difficult to fake.  Maybe that's why Bob Dylan's more popular than Michael Bolton:  It's easier to lie with words than music, and the successful transmission of emotion is more important to us than the sweetness of the voice.

So I hereby propose a modification to Turing's test:  Instead of asking our entity to speak, let's ask it to sing.  If it can make us cry with a sad song, we'll say that it's conscious.  And if it can get us aroused - with, say, a new version of "Sexual Healing" - well, then let's just say our experiment could take an unexpected turn.

It's true that all of the arguments against the Turing Test could also be used against this one, so it doesn't really advance the debate very far. But what the hell:  At least we might hear a decent song for a change, instead of all the crap they've been playing lately.

Thunder Soul; or, a Secretary for the Arts?

by Katherine McNamara

Thunder Soul

A terrific documentary comes your way early this summer: Thunder Soul, about the legendary Kashmere Stage Band and its inspired leader, Conrad O. Johnson. The film's director is Mark Landsman, who is very good at catching energy on screen. Music, kids at risk, a black high school in Houston, a first-rate musician who taught "his" pupils how to be the very best players in their world: that is Landsman's happy subject. His film is not sentimental or, even worse, a "celebration": it knows its cinematic values and serves them straight up: excellence, to start with; excellence, to finish. He conveys joy in every direction with no unearned emotion; cutting, framing, pacing with precision and surprise.

Conrad O. Johnson was a jazz performer, arranger, and composer who was going to go on the road in the '60s, until he met a strong, pretty woman, Mama Birdie, as she came to be called, who agreed to marry him. In turn, he agreed to stay home, to be with her and the four children they would have, and find work locally. He taught band at various schools, then in 1969, moved to Kashmere High School, in North Houston, a closely-knit African-American part of town, where the principal, rightly, gave him free run of the music program.

The film opens in 2008, when Craig Baldwin, one of Johnson's former musicians (1975) and a self-described "near felon" in the old days, helps organize a reunion concert to honor Prof, as he's always been called, their old master, 92 years on him. Craig knows his stuff. He calls out old comrades who haven't lifted a horn in 30 years and gets them back on track. The energy crackles, the music makes you jump. Grown men and women fill the chairs they once claimed in the old music room, which had been their sound-stage and sanctuary. Prof, so frail, summons himself up from a hospital bed to attend the marvelous concerts (there are two), beams, approves, shows his former students his love. All is complete.

Mark Landsman heard a story on NPR about the coming reunion, and knew he had to get to Houston with his camera. A commission came from Snoot Entertainment, and he was on his way. What struck him particularly, he told me, was the vibrant, tightly-knit community in which Prof had worked. North Houston was a black district where everybody knew everybody else, knew their children, and looked out for each other. When the Kashmere Stage Band went to state competitions, when it went to Paris and to Japan, neighborhood people got together and held bake sales and put out cans for change and found innumerable ways to raise the needed money. The kids went, they saw, they conquered. From 1969 to 1978, the Kashmere Stage Band won 42 out of 46 competitions, and came in first in the state, the only black student band to win the title in those years.

One of the pleasures of life is listening to, or  reading, old-time jazz musicians and baseball players talk about the craft of their art. Think of Buck O'Neil on the Negro League on Ken Burns' Baseball series (or writing about it in his oral history of an autobiography), or, read, say,  Monk's advice (1960) to the saxophonist Steve Lacy:

Just because you're not a drummer, doesn't mean that you don't have to keep time.
Pat your foot & sing the melody in your head when you play.
Stop playing all that bullshit those weird notes, play the melody!
Make the drummer sound good.
Discrimination is important.
You've got to dig it, you dig?
All reet! ...

A record producer named Eothen Allapatt, general manager of Stone's Throw Records and founder of his own label, Now-Again, interviewed Conrad Johnson a few years ago.  He is in the film, too. He loves this music. The interview is lively, if a bit poignant, as Prof Johnson is getting on. It's instructive, though.

E: Buddy Smith told me that you came up with Illinois Jacquet!
C: Yeah. We used to play. Arnette Cobb too. We all lived in Houston, I played…. well, during those days it was different. To advertise, if a company put out — let’s say a new brand of soda water — well, they would advertise it by putting a band on a truck and letting the truck drive around the city. Or they would have us play at the stand where they were selling, and the music would draw people to the stand. Illinois was a drummer at that time! This was around 1939 or 1940.

E: Were there any other local musicians that blew your mind?
C: There was a band called The Birmingham Blues Blowers. This was in Houston. We listened to them quite a bit. They played many proms at the school. I remember peeping through the windows of the gymnasium when I was a little kid to watch them play. I said, “I want to do that!”
........

E: When did you join your first professional band?
C: Just out of high school. I played almost every joint in Houston, whether they had small bands or whatever. I was all over the place.

E: What was it like, being a black performer at the time of Jim Crow? Segregation, outright racism?
C: I’m going to explain it to you like this. At that time, the people – black and white - who really had the money to hire the players wanted black performers. Because they were the naturals - blacks introduced jazz to the world.

E: So it wasn’t hard for you to get gigs?
C: Man, we had almost all the gigs! I was working all I wanted to. Blacks introduced this music. If people wanted to get real jazz, they had to hire black bands.

Prof tells Allapatt about the blues in Texas, about jazz ("You see, you can’t play jazz if you can’t play the blues. Jazz has blues lines running through it. This was just something that people understood. It was a branch of music — the blues. But there could be sad blues, happy blues, work song blues. Basically jazz came from blues and gospel.") He talks about his early record-producing days; about the music he wrote; how he got into r&b. The two men talk about musicians who came up from Texas, those who had been Prof's students and had gone on to turn professional.

"I had a free run at the band."

It's a good story, how Johnson comes to Kashmere High School. "Well," he says, "the principal of Booker T. Washington, George Hanes, left and moved to Kashmere, so I went there. I had a free run at the band. George was a musician himself — a jazz drummer. He told me, 'Listen, I want everybody to know what you’re doing here. So I’m going to let you take off and do jobs with the stage band, whether it’s school hours or not.' He took a big responsibility ‘cause the teachers didn’t like that. Anyway, that’s when the band got popular."

This is not a small point. I want to underline it. Having arts in the schools depends on having real artists in the schools and letting them do their work.  

E: Do you think that the crop of students you were drawing from were inherently talented?

C: No, they didn’t have it until we worked with them. And we developed that talent. See, I didn’t lead a band that you had to take a test to join. The students would simply apply to enter the band. I’d let almost all of them in, there were very few that I turned down.

E: So many hours a day did you play with the students?

C: Well, if you include going on jobs and all that? At night I’d be with them for like 4 or 5 hours. And during the regular school day I’d be with them for like 2 or 3 hours.

E: Those kids, and the music, was – matter of fact, it is – your life.

C: That’s true.

E: You dedicated so much to your students. Did they appreciate you for this?

C: Oh yeah, before they came to me they didn’t know anything about the music!

.....

E: How much did you have to work to get your kids to play so well? Your high school students were as good as any funk band in the nation!

C: The thing about it is, they had to depend on me for interpretation and concept. But they listened. And they got it! And once they did, it was right on the money. It was there.

.....

E: A lot of band directors weren’t teaching their kids, rather they were just walking them through performances. Didn’t you take a more instructional role?

C: Exactly right. The kids didn’t know a thing about jazz. Look man, the history would be transmitted as I taught. It entered as I taught.

E: Well, you are living history.

C: I guess so…

If you invite artists into schools, you don't gauge their success by how many poems are produced, or pictures drawn, or slides looked at, or tunes listened to. Nor even by how many medals and cups are won. Artists who can make a kind of safe place where youngsters can make without self-consciousness; where they learn their craft from the inside out, in ways proper to the art's own form; where they can learn how the body feels when it makes good work: those artists are the ones wanted. Nobody on the outside really knows what happens when a poet or musician or puppeteer encounters students, when the students come alive to him, to her. They are in a place of their own, surrounded by thick imaginary walls, like encircling arms, built by the adroit artist. What they do is make things. That's it, and there's no real measure for what happens, except excellence. Any environment short of that is not a place for art.

"I gave them the music."

E: When you first started bringing the band to contests, how long did it take before you started sweeping the shows?

C: That is the question! It took about two and a half years before I really got into it. The judges just didn’t want to believe it at first. They would always make us tie or something. So I said, “OK, you want to make ties, we’ll see about that.” So I went and wrote more music, and came to find out later from one of the judges that the music I wrote was the strongest.... And for many years I was the only black band in those contests.

E: You were going up against programs with lots of money – 

C: And plenty of teachers! They had private teachers!

E: And you were destroying them. How?

C: It was the feeling of the band. I gave them the music. You see, the kids didn’t know much about music when they came there. The students I was teaching only knew the rock era. But I taught them jazz. And the way that they understood it was uncanny. We won festival after festival. I was just inducted into the Texas Bandmasters Hall of Fame. When I was at the ceremony, I saw band directors that knew me from the years that I led Kashmere. And they said, “Man, when we saw you in those competitions, we knew we were playing for second or third place.” I trained my kids to try to win the contest. Give it all you got and then don’t worry. And it worked. There would be times when the kids came to me and they wanted to fight! And I said, “No, you can’t fight ‘cause you’ll destroy your image.” Man, other kids would tell them some ugly things. Kashmere played well and the kids couldn’t beat them. I had to talk to my kids, man ‘cause these kids WOULD FIGHT!

E: And they were mean looking dudes! On the Zero Point cover? Man!

C: (Laughs) Yeah, you see all of them! Look here, they could fight. But I controlled them. And it ended up that the band directors and the students actually liked them.

"That was hope."

By the end of the 1970s, the school administration changed, and the new people began to make Conrad Johnson's school life unpleasant.

E: They basically forced you into retirement!

C: That’s right…

....

E: Look back on those years that you lead the Kashmere Stage Band. That was hope. When you look back, how do you view it as a whole?

C: Here’s the way I look at it. All of the people — this is true — all of the people who saw that band perform and heard the magnificence in their sound, and their work…  Only those people will ever know. The records are just a facsimile. Seeing and hearing that band perform was unexplainable. There was nowhere for that band to go, they’d done everything. Once the kids from Kashmere got to college, they saw that they had already one everything that college bands were doing. So they weren’t interested in going there. They would go to college, but some wouldn’t even play in the college band. And a lot of kids stopped playing music altogether once they left the high school. And I had some fine players! It upset me… 

A Secretary for the Arts?

Bill Ivey, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities under Clinton, has been one of the "team leads" reviewing the status of NEH and the National Endowment for the Arts. He seems to be adept at blending arts administration, university foundations, and corporate "intervention" in ways meant to help arts professionals think about fostering American arts and culture. (It is not clear to me where artists live in this line-up.) Several years ago, an article about him in Backstage (no link available) noted:

Perhaps more audaciously, Ivey is also calling on corporations to think more deeply about their responsibility to society and for the nonprofit arts sector, in turn, to study examples from the commercial realm for innovative new models to consider: "When Goddard Lieberson was president of Columbia Records, he viewed a record label as a public trust: He knew it would always have a vibrant classical division even if it didn't contribute to the bottom line, because it didn't operate as a subset of a subset of a multinational corporation. Today, with boards of directors harassed by shareholders each quarter, they don't have the flexibility to take risks that produce great art." HBO, by contrasting example, "sells subscriptions and produces content that generates buzz and a perception of quality, which is how you get 'Angels in America,' certainly one of the most important TV events of the last 24 months." Should it prove unable or unwilling to study new models, the arts will be "ignoring the fact that both the nonprofit and commercial business models make it very tough to make creative decisions. Among nonprofits, it's budget constraints, the inability to grow new revenue streams. Among for-profits, it's parent companies chasing stock prices and the inability to think of artists' development over the long haul." Neither of which, he says, are healthy for our culture.

Having run a non-profit Web journal myself for ten years, I recognize the accuracy of his comment, but also its incompleteness. Of course, he said this during the Bush administration, when the head of our government was an MBA. Our new president is a writer. The musician Quincey Jones has said he would press Obama to appoint a Secretary of the Arts.

What should the Secretary of the Arts do? (Who should s/he be: an artist? An arts administrator? Someone who is both, but more like Jane Alexander than Dana Gioia, perhaps?) How to encourage and enlarge the making of art, without making it "official" art, and without watering it down, making it safe and nice? Does the stimulus package contain an Artists' Relief Act? If we are thinking more specifically about arts in the schools — and we should; arts programs are being cut right and left, as local revenues dry up like rivers in the desert — we have to figure out new ways for schools to nourish the minds and hearts of children. The arts are glorious, but they are not easy, and our national public culture is deeply philistine. 

In the matter of artists in schools, we ought to look at the best examples available to us, even while remembering that they can't, finally, be copied. To go into schools you need real artists, people like Conrad O. Johnson, who was a musician to the very ends of his nerves; who cared about the children; who knew — you have to know and belived this, without question or second thought, and you can't fake it — that his students could be the best musicians in the world. Yes, they won prizes and yes, they went to Europe and Japan; and yes, they lived, and grew in fullness. But then a new administrator cut the cords of money and enthusiasm, and Conrad Johnson retired, as he had to do, because he could not compromise his program. Whatever bureaucratic justification was given by the administrator, to whomever he had to give it, was a kind of lie. Not an intentional lie, but a lie of the bureaucracy: the kind of lie that bureaucracies tell and encourage all the time: because, however the bureaucracy justifies itself, it has nothing to do, finally, with the music, with the art, with the artist and his pupils. Whatever reasons they give you are lies, unless they can say straight out: this program gives us trouble: because that is what they really mean.

And yet: where will the money come from? And yet, if you run a school district or an arts agency, is it not better to be poor, if that is the case, and truthful?

The former director of the National Endowment for the Arts, himself a poet and businessman, must have approved the gimmicky slogan broadcast relentlessly for his agency: "A great nation deserves great art." This is not truthful, in many ways, as most advertising is not truthful, and I hope it has already gone away. Aside from the question of "great nation" — do we mean, an enormous nation? one that can define the meaning of "torture" as it likes? one that has violated international law with impunity? that swept aside all financial regulation and so, undermined the global economy? — no nation "deserves" "great art." Nobody "deserves" great art. Art, its makers, and its making, follow their own, exigent rules.

A long time ago, I was an itinerant poet in Athabaskan schools in the Alaskan interior. Then and now, I believed you always offer the best work you can to youngsters, because you are responsible to them just as much as you are responsible to your art. I saw Thunder Soul in Washington, D.C., the day before Barak Obama was inaugurated. Yes, this is a time of enormous crisis, but we in the audience found ourselves jumping to the music, and afterward, we met the director, and Craig Baldwin, who had led the reunion band, and Conrad O. Johnson, Jr., director of the foundation named for his father.

The producers, the director, Landsman, the director of photography, Sandra Chandler, and the editor, Claire Didier, plan a wide-spread release of the film early next summer. In the meantime, they are going to show it in schools and churches and town auditoria, wherever people know that things can be better if we work together. When Thunder Soul comes your way, you can welcome it, because it makes you feel good honestly, complexly, as an adult. The whole experience is a delight. The job that will follow is very, very hard. Work worth doing, with zest.

Links

Thunder Soul, the movie (watch this space for more information)

Conrad O. Johnson  

NPR story about the Kashmere Stage Band reunion 

Eothen Allapat's interview of Conrad O. Johnson (excerpts can be seen in the movie, as well) 

Conrad O. Johnson Foundation 

Kashmere H.S. Stage Band cuts

Dave Eggers's arts and schools initiative 

Texas Thunder Soul 1968-74, the cds

A History of Tomorrow: The Silent Generation Sings

My Doorstep

Welcome to my space. Come in, take off your boots, and make yourself at home: especially if you haven't got one any more. Warm yourself by my fire. It's going to be a long, cold winter. You know it and I know it. It's 7 degrees in the South Bronx this morning, as I write, but for about a quarter of an hour the rising sun comes romping westward down the street into my window, casting everything in gold, shining out the trash-strewn streets and sparse-shelved bodegas and vacant lots and abandoned baby carriages. For a moment.

Wall Street sure laid us one ginormous goose-egg. (I guess now we know what the inverse of that image on the Right looks like.) But tomorrow it'll all crack wide open. Hope you like your Humpty-Dumptys sunny-side up. I know I do. I used to take them scrambled, but now I know on which side my bread is buttered.

You're probably scrambling, hunting down that endangered species known as a job, scientific name JobIS bonUS. I feel your pain. Someone recently wrote that the Internet, as advanced as it seems, is still in the hunter-gatherer stage. Well, I've been a-huntin', and a-gatherin', and I've got laid in these weeds all kinds of Easter eggs for you to enjoy. It's better than a game of Boggle.

So how's about I tell you a story?   

_{This is going to be epic.}
But first, some epigraphs to amuse your bouche.

One other hint: hover over the hyperlinks. A hawk circles above his prey before he goes in for the kill.

Diptych: A Prologue

Left: Saturn Devouring His Sons, Peter Paul Rubens, 1636
Right: The Ancient of Days, William Blake, 1794

The Rubens, above, hangs in the Prado. If you go there, you'll see that one of the child's eyes has a gleaming dot on the iris, the precise focal point of light in the entire painting. If you look very closely, you'll see that it was painted with a dab of pure liquid silver or quicksilver. Wherever you stand in the gallery, the brightest point of light is always concentrated on the horror-stricken eye of Saturn's infant. Silverwhite light. Genius. You might be able to see it online if you follow the directions here.

1. The Biographer

Have I ever told you about my father?

He was born in 1939 in Georgetown, a small coastal town in segregated South Carolina. My grandfather owned an appliance store there during the Depression, and managed to keep it open, owned by him, until his retirement in the 1990s. When my dad applied for college in 1957, he was awarded a full scholarship to the Rensslaer Polytechnic Institute after attending the prestigious National High School Institute for Engineering at Northwestern University. He also earned a place at Yale, with an inadequately small scholarship and work-study. Tuition that year was $3,000, the same price as a new car. Far too much. Over a very solemn conversation at the kitchen table, it was decided: "Go to Yale. We'll figure out a way." My grandparents scrimped and saved and my dad worked mad hours to afford the fees. He matriculated under the quota, which wasn't eliminated until the year after he graduated. He struggled to completely destroy any hint of a southern accent in his voice, and suppress his Jewish cultural identity, in order to integrate with the WASP establishment. It was hard. The stresses were great. The cultural barriers were immense. He drank. A lot.

In his first year, he nearly failed out because his public South Carolinian education hadn't prepared him for the rigors of an Ivy League engineering program. As he advanced, he wanted to be a professor of ancient history. But he was terrible at languages; couldn't master the French, much less the Latin or Greek. So he went to law school on his dean's advice. ("What do you want to do?" "I dunno," he shrugged. "Why don't you apply to law school?") He applied to Harvard, Yale and Columbia and got in at all three. (Ahh, those were the days.) He enrolled at Yale mainly because he couldn't be bothered to move all his stuff.

That was 1961. By 1964 Kennedy was dead, the counterculture was beginning, the Draft was on, and my dad sought refuge in a one-year tax law program in order to defer it. He was an associate with a top New York City law firm for four years, met my mother, and then they moved to the Sun Belt when it looked like a Rome called New York City was being overrun by barbarians in the early 1970s.

He worked very hard, made money, sent his son – eventually – to a very fine university, lived well, drank good wines, traveled all over the world, and eventually would have the market bilk him out of a great deal of his retirement.

He doesn't talk about himself very much.

2. The Marketer

Hi there, folks! My name is Mephistopheles. That's how you would address me, at any rate. For I am in marketing – lower, perhaps, on the ladder of professional esteem than even a lawyer. A Devil, you call me. Don't worry, I take that epithet philosophically. Spending a season in Hell has its advantages. Down underground, there's nothing to do all day but hear the screams of the Damned, and endlessly barrel-roll on a spit while your flesh is scarred by black flames. Wicked good fun if you're into that.

At the lowest rung of the cycle, with your back spread-eagled for the scorching, the vast reserves of Dark Energy in the universe shoot a hotwhite light through your mind. For an instant, you'd swear you could see Lucifer plummeting, a shooting star falling from the firmament, illuminating the third Host of Heaven in headlong descent. And as the burning ember of an Archangel strikes the event horizon – it plays over and over in your mind, catastrophically, searing into your retinas like FOX News coverage of 9/11 – the disc of the world warms golden, the entire crust of the Earth is molten translucent, and from below you can see all the Earth's entities vaguely, as if through gauze bandages. If you're very, very lucky you can ride the cellphone towers up to the satellites, and jump on the radio-wave bleed-off, and speed on an electron rail right out into Space, surfing between frequencies as swiftly as you'd flick an Aquos remote. It's totally "lying in the gutter, gazing at the stars," dudes and dudettes. It's like being a celestial couch potato; only problem is that cellphone reception is lousy here, down in the bowels of Hell, and you can't call for Domino's. (I mean, even if their only deliverable items to this Hell-hole were anchovy-onion pies, I swear I'd make an effort to stumble into the Vestibule. Because if there were delivery service in Hell, you better believe they'd take plastic.)

The point I'm trying to make

is that as you're traveling further out in Space, you're traveling back in media-time, too. Things start to get real funky, like reading a blog backward to the start. But then, wouldn't you know it: just as you've deliciously anticlimaxed – for example, by discovering who killed Lilly Kane before fingering the suspects – that Damned spit-roaster flips you over again. Your face is in the fire and your hairy ass is mooning everyone in Hell. And you can't tell whether it's the sheer embarrassment, or the 33rd-degree burn on your lip, that hurts the more.

I figure you might as well make the best of a bad situation. See, from the opposite poles of the Earth, Vishnu and Shiva are having a grand old party. They're spinning that spit-roaster about 5,000 rpm, churning the molten core of the Earth and creating its magnetic field. (Consider yourselves lucky – without those Indian deities, we'd all be tv dinners, which is why every night here is a Chicken Phal night.) Every nanosecond of every day, all of us Damned bastards are spinning wildly in our graves, watching the media roll out a red carpet to the stars. Damned reruns: if I could, I'd fall down on my knees and repent! yes! just so I'd never have to see Fonzie jump the shark again. (Though Lucy in the chocolate factory cracks me up every time. I dig those fiery redheads.)    

I'll grant you, though, this torture is definitely an information technology. In my infinitely recurring nanoseconds of radiowave bliss, I've learned to fast-forward through the most recent episodes (I can catch up on Hulu later), as well as the ones I've seen a million times – and the infinite regress of syndication packages – and delve back, back into your land of men, your land of men and women too. It's tough work, getting out of the present tension; I've spent a long, long time (billions of nanoseconds, that is) merely zipping in and out of your cellphone-braced heads, surfing the foam of the Web –

These shapings of the unregenerate mind ;
Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break
On vain Philosophy's aye-babbling spring.

– and I gotta tell you, a little learning's a dangerous thing. Maybe you should study yourselves more. Well, that's why I'm here. I don't know if you've run across an Infernal Calendar lately. You might be able to find one in the disused basement of a local urban planning board, through the door marked "Beware the Leopard," and hung up on the wall behind Miss December, because Janus has two faces. (Clever, eh?) If you find it, you'll see that a season in Hell lasts about 400 years, give or take a couple runs around the solar block. And believe me, at the end of that season, Hell does indeed freeze over. You've heard the phrase "colder than a witch's tit"? Nah, that demon-mother's-milk is like a hot toddy compared to the stuff we have to deal with. It's like Chicago without Gore-tex(TM) and whiskey. So that's when I go on winter break. Now, what with the recession and all, I suppose I should have just taken a staycation, and watch endless reruns of the Dark Lord in His Infinite Puissance chomping on Brutus, Cassius and Judas Iscariot (schadenfreude never gets old in Hell) but seeing how you American folk are in a mess o'trouble, I thought I'd take advantage of Old Smokey while he's distracted with his meal, and at least try to catch the notice of The Man Upstairs by handing over a bit of Knowledge. See, God? Eventually, eating of the Apple bears fruit. But it ain't gonna be easy. It's gonna take work.             

Now, the following is a bit confidential, so please follow me into my office. And shut the door.

So, Fascinated Reader, what d'ya think of that, eh?
Unimpressed? Whaa? Okay, so I guess you folks aren't as clueless as I thought. Moving on...

3. Biography Redux

As we have said, my father is almost 70 years old: an almost exact contemporary of Senator John McCain, the final political (and, we must say, a certain social) presidential-caliber representative of his generation, by which we term The Silent Generation.

What are the characteristics of The Silent Generation?
They were born during the Depression years, and were commanded to silence their emotions, and work very hard, as the second wave of the 20th-century calamities descended. They were too young to fight in World War II, but were imbued at an early age with heroics being transmitted by radio, newsreel and comic books. Afterward, they were additionally burdened by both the sacrifices that their "elder brothers" endured, and their knowledge that they had lost the opportunity to claim their own heroism. (I personally suspect that is why we had a desire to fight the Korean War without a serious draft. A certain segment of the American population retained that desire for heroism and volunteered.) This generation grew up during the 1950s, an age of belief in American know-how, stick-to-it-iveness, nose-to-the-grindstone, repressing-emotional-intrusions, a religious belief in the chain of command (the integration of World War II military values into civilian life), a belief in the rightness of the country's decision-making process, conformity to all of the above, and a desire – and a belief in their ordained ability – to shape the world via the collective efforts produced by the American machine. The previous generation, the Greatest Generation – the greatest generation?! – ever? – into eternity? – had destroyed global tyranny (well, half-destroyed it, at any rate, which is why Truman got the boot). This Silent Generation, repressed in its ability to voice its (boiling, rageful) frustration with the hardships caused by the Lost Generation – which had everything and lost it – in addition to the constant pressure and paranoia of a Soviet A-bomb attack – keep your head down, children, and don't look at the light – which had to have loomed larger than a nightmare bogeyman – as well as the additional burdens of being oppressed by an Eisenhower leadership of heroic character (with all its faults), was then inspired to control, subdue, and conquer the natural environment itself.

It was the only way they could kill their fathers. In the Freudian sense, I mean.

And the Nazis. Who killed their fathers, even if they returned home alive. The Nazis killed them by stopping them from speaking the unspeakable things. Death-in-life and life-in-death, as Yeats might say. The fathers and the Nazis together who stood like twin colossi erected on a plain, one white one black, atop the buried acorns of their lives.

To be human and alive is to be able to communicate, and the cone of silence swallowed two generations.

The interstate system, the oil industry, plastics, the car, the Moon Shot – gaining personal freedom via technology and consumer goods – was the only way to speak, enunciate freedom, and compete against the Soviet Union directly, when direct military confrontation would have meant world holocaust.

It's okay. Gravity makes a rainbow, you know. Just ask Werner von Braun.

As I recall, our communications technology is pretty good.
Dot. Dot. Dot.

Zwwee-ch-chzzewshhhcgrhrhwwheeeHeeey, all you groovy cats, this is DJ Mephistopheles comin’ to you DEAD, DEAD DEADER THAN DEAD over this wicked pirated Evangelical frequency at 66.6 FM on your digital dial, because we’re all Manichaeists in the underworld. All talk radio for the pleasure of your outrage, only at K-Triple-X. What’s that K stand for? Fucked if I know. The Klan? No way, dudes and dudettes, they are so lame-o these days, they are so, like, waaaay last century that we stuck them in some stupid pits, they can’t make it up to this broadcast level of Hell. And they have these tinny microphones that only catch really narrow wavelengths. See, here on K-Triple-X, we go real deep, I mean plunging those vibes into the Earth to make it shake its booty. Where they can't follow. (You know white men can’t dance.) And we don’t let them use our gear. I mean, seriously, dudes and dudettes, I’m DJ Mephistopheles, He From Whom All Light Hath Been Stripped, and all I have to say to the KKK is – turnabout is fair play, bitches.

Sooo, what’s the story, Morning Glory? I’ve got your GPS right here, baby, I can see where you’re coming from, but do you know where you're @?

EDDY

Do you know where you are?

You’re in the Labyrinth, sweet child o'mine, and oh it’s got plasma flatscreen walls. So pretty, child. I’ll  have you so delightfully entertained while you fatten up on polyunsaturated fats, you'll never know when the Minotaur bears down on you. Oh. Oops. He's here already. When you're up to your neck in the shit of the bull market, you've just got to laugh: an expletive suddenly gains crystal-clear definition via the SPIRALnumbers on your balance sheet.

It's funny, you know: the last time a snowball had a chance in Hell, I was out here on contract, helping out some arrogant prick – a doctor, as I recall – what was his name? (it's so difficult to remember these things after a marathon of "Keeping Up With the Kardashians.") Ohh, yeah: FAUSTUS, that was him! If ever there was a physic in need of some serious medicine...like electroshock therapy – I kept warning him, "You'll have Hell to pay for this..." and he kept reading that like, "Oh goodie – Satan himself is comp'ing me!" What a WHIRLdunce. And he thought he was sooooo smart. Heh. He thought he was bored with his studies, but really, when it came down to it, he just couldn't be arsed to apply himself.

So Herr Doktor works his arcane magic, not unlike our financial wizards and their "exotic instruments," POOLconjuring effervescent, evanescent moneys from the cold wastes of Cyberia, where all but the brainbrawniest fear to tread, for the cryptic maps are written in invisible ink. And oh, organizing world trade's his oyster, too –

How am I glutted with conceit of this!
Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please...
I'll have them fly to India for gold,
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the new-found world
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates...

Man! When are you FALLINGgonna learn? After I fired that mountebank, I instantly materialized in front of my friend Kit to tell him all about it. And he told it to all of you. But then he got a shiv in the ocular – I guess everyone's got to pay for their Knowledge – in the Ivy it's going for 200 large – and now nobody reads Marlowe any more. Okay, I'll sling you some lines from a more familiar face:

O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables,--meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;
At least I'm sure it may be so in Denmark:WOMAN

Yeah, we're all shot to Hell, dudes and dudettes, and I'm not out of it either. But it's gonna be okay. I promise. I hear the Greeks and FALLENRomans declaiming out in the Forum of the Vestibule, and one of them insists that Dante wrote at least one other book. Of course, no one around here picks it up – not that we don't have it; both Blake and Borges rifled through our stacks, and found they're at least as good as Amazon's – it's just that everyone here's so godDamned solipsistic, always wanting to read about Themselves. I once mustered enough energy to get out the Door, but all I saw was this Dark Wood, and I was afraid. I heard the water-nymphs and dryads whispering on the DOWNwind about the existence of a third book, but they're just mythological creatures, not even gods, and I didn't trust them. Besides – the end of Battlestar Galactica was just beginning. So I had to get back to my sofa. Hey, it's an Eternal struggle. Forget about the Fifth Cylon; who do you think is hotter, Kara Thrace, Boomer, Athena, or Six? I dunno. it's an even race down to The Wire, but I have a feeling Kara's my kind of crazy.

Anyhow, that's the end of my Hellacious program. Next up, we've got DJ Ba'al, ballin' the Jack in a Battle of the Bands between Slayer and Megadeth. Stay tuned...shhhhhweeeeiiighcgchhhhhEEEEEEEE

THIS
IS A TEST
OF THE EMERGENCY BROADCAST SIGNAL
IF THIS WERE AN ACTUAL EMERGENCY
YOU WOULD NOT HAVE HEARD THE SIGNAL

London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling

down
my fair
lady


Right.

We must set our lands
in order.

I will reduce you
to order.

5. The Dream of @

 

 

I will expand you into order.

6. @Home

– @, is that you?
– Yes, I'm back, ED.
– What time is it?
– Late. Late. Too late.
– You didn't call, you didn't email, you didn't IM... What the Hell is the matter with you?
– I'm sorry, ED, I'm really sorry. I just...needed some time to think things through.
– Think? What the Hell do you mean? What are you trying to say?
– Nothing, ED, really. I just had to be in my own space for a while.
– I had the most horrible dream while you were gone. Frightening forebodings. I was so sure you weren't ever coming back.
– Whatever do you mean?
– Oh, god. I've never felt you so distant. It's like you were a million miles away. You said something about having to deal with some stupid bullshit, and then I don't hear from you for three whole days! Once I thought I heard your voice. It was disembodied, like it was coming from a completely different universe. The thread that connected us, I could feel it fray, then break -- I felt it in my bones.
– No, ED, no. None of that could ever happen. You're the most beautiful woman I've ever known. And the way your mind works -- the way you react to my touch -- so supple, so fluid, such Classical forms, such Romantic organic depths, oh you have worlds within worlds within your body. We were made for each other. You're mine. And I am yours.
– Hmmpf. Well, will you at least tell me, from now on, when you're going to be home?
– EDDY, sometimes I don't know. I catch ill-fated winds, I get caught in whirlpools, I find myself among strange people and have to puzzle my way out of their homes. And sometimes I have to fight monsters, and I can't leave until they're dead. But I would never, ever miss your birthday. I mean, have you seen the present I made for you?
– What?
– Turn on the light.
– Oh.
– See? All of this -- it's all for you. So that whenever I'm away, you'll know that I'm always @Home with you. Have you looked over there?
– This box?
– Open it.
   ____________
– [                       ]
– My god, that's ugly.
– No, that's not the real ring, it's symbolic.
– Of what?
– The wood in that ring? That's oak. The very same oak that grew into the posts of our bed, the living tree that grows from the earth itself. I had to topple two enormous statues that were covering the acorns, so they could grow into our bed. You gave me that strength.
                                                                                        So what was this dream you had?
– Oh my god. It seems so silly now. There was this crazed midget running around trying to fuck me. Somehow I grew fat and stupid and you and all your friends rejected me. I was catastrophic, I didn't know who I was, I whored myself out and circled round the drain and fell into space and out of Hell and through language itself until I smacked down on the lap of this really annoying guy who just kept talking bullshit.
– So did you fuck him?
– Who?
– The midget.
– Oh, Hell no! Though I got him pretty steamed up. He started Nausicaaing me while I was in the bath. Heh. He was in marketing so I knew exactly what to do. Five bars of a shampoo commercial and he was PreEjaying into his hairy knuckle-dragging palms.
– HA! What a loser.
– But there was this other guy, now he wasn't so bad. Tall, well-spoken, kinky. I think he was one of your readers.
– What happened with him?
– Oh, he basically told me to fuck off because I was fat and stupid. But you should have seen his face when I stepped out of the bath. I was Aphrodite rising from the sea-foam, for all he cared. I told him to lick my fuck-me boots.
– You did not.
– Did too.
– And did he?
– I told him to lick my souls.
– And did he?
                    Did he?
                                You're such a big faker. Listen...
I've got something really important to tell you.
– What?
– Something wonderful.
–What?
– I think we're on for a real Renaissance.
– Things are real bad out there, @.
– I know. And I know Obama's going to screw up some things. I mean, he's going to have to orchestrate the three circles of Federal power like the Ringling Brothers. He'll have to juggle catastrophes like live chainsaws. He'll have to catch supervillains in the Web quicker than Spider-Man. But he's got all of us on his side. And we're powerful. We have skills.
– To pay the bills?
– Well, that's the only catch. I still need to find a J.O.B. If there's anyone you know who's hiring, please, send my stuff along.
– I don't think you'll have any problem.
– You don't?
– Not any more.
– Well, I guess we'll see. But I guess the point that I was trying to make, they entire point of today's craziness, is that -- it's so perfectly obvious to me -- the human creative potential has never been so great. And with the human networks we're creating, we can all be painters, musicians, writers, DJs, filmmakers, composers, compositors, animators, information architects, poets -- and yes, marketers of all these things too, um, I suppose -- we do live in the Matrix, and yeah, we can unplug if we really want, but we can also figure out styles of kung-fu that the Old Masters never dreamt of. We need to stop thinking within the Barzunian entropic Matrix of "dawn to decadence," and challenge ourselves to beat those who -- heh -- thought they had it going on, centuries ago. The Internet is ten times Blake's vision of Heaven before Urizen glowered guiltily, separated himself, and fell into the corporeal universe to become Jehovah/Satan. Except for the sex. (We should all be able to sun ourselves naked in the backyard.)
– Well, thank you for that soapbox, Mister Information Secretary@Home.
– Really, I needed to say it. We're so caught up in the present nanosecond that we've forgotten: the Internet is the most complicated thing ever created by human beings. The people who built the Space Shuttle might take issue with that, but the Internet: we built it all together. The military men and the organization men of the Silent Generation, the hippies and surfers in California who turned cyberculturists, and all of you.
– You who?
– Sorry, I lost a packet there. Did you say Yahoo!?
– No, of course not!
– Good, because they're crap.
– No, no, everyone knows they're crap. I said "You who?"
– That's some pretty decent chocolate milk, right?
– Aiyeeee!! I mean "Who the hell are you talking to??"
– Ohh. You. <tok tok> On the other side of this window.
– Don't even get me started talking about Windows.
– Wasn't intending to. Hello, all of you on the other side of the window. I know you're all looking in. I can't seem to draw the blinds any tighter. But there it is. You lookin' at me? --I said, are you lookin' at me, cyberpunk? High-five. Not too hard. 'Specially if you've got a touch-screen.
– Yes, @ is right on this one, you'd better listen to him, children. Touch-screens are very sensitive.
– Yo, cyberpunks. I've seen such amazing stuff out there recently. I couldn't believe what was out there, when I first tried to come home from the War, and got blown off course in a hail of tangents. Completely ingenious art --
– Like what?
– It's too late at night for that discussion. Can we talk about it more in the coming weeks?
– Sure. What else have you seen?
– I've seen these awesome webapps that basically allow you to run an entire business from a single laptop -- billing and finance, creative ideas, virtual conference rooms, it's going to be a total revolution in the way we work.
~~ Say what? 
– Who the hell are you? What are you doing in my house? How'd you get in here?
~~ I'm a Fascinated Reader. I couldn't help overhearing...
– You are nothing like I imagined you. No-thing. Wow, what a Jilloff-worthy-fantasy killer you are!
~~ I demand to know which Webapps you're talking about!
– WAAAAAA!
– See! Look what you did. You woke up the baby.
– Look, I don't know who you are or where you came from but you're getting out of our house right now. Here's two tickets to the Theatre. Learn what you can there. Show starts in about two seconds so you better move.
– WAAAAAA!
– Look, honey, can you take care of baby Ampersand? I'm exhausted from my travels, and I still need to email my dad tonight. It's his 70th birthday really soon, and I need to tell him some things.
– Sure. I'll be nursing &. Come to bed when you're done.

Dear Dad,

I'm sorry. I understand things a lot better now. I understand why you have trouble talking. But you gave me the chance to say things. You gave me the tools to say the things I have to say. It's the dense network and the tight structure and the wiry line that contains, that directs the path of the generative Chaos. You gave us this world, this space here, where I met my future wife. I would never have met her – ever – if you hadn't given us the method and the medium. Thank you. Happy 70th birthday. And you can have your cake and eat it too, because it's going to be a whole new world tomorrow. A better one, where people can talk to one another, and not be so angry all the time. We're going to build it. We're really going to build it. Because we can all be Spider-Men on this Web. Thank you.

Love,
@Home

P.S. Always remember:

May the road rise with you.

<send>

– You in here, ED?
– Yes. Come see your baby daughter.
– Hello, ED and &. You know, it's amazing how much she knows at just two-and-a-half months old.
– She's got a real sense of place, just like her father.
– EDDY, I was thinking. We haven't really given her a full name yet.
– Well, it needs to be grand. She was born at an epic time.
– We should combine our surnames.
– Really, @? I never liked being called EDDY Mañana. Every time anyone said my name, it was like invoking Zeno's Paradox.
– Well, being born @Ahora wasn't great shakes either. I think the name gave me myopia from the cradle. I was never able to see too far down the road.
– So let's think. &... &...
– Dot.
– Dot?
– My grandmother's name.
– I like it. Say it again.
– Dot.
– Third time's the charm. &... . That's it. We got it.
– Wait a sec. Look at what's there. We've got to sound it out. Ampersand -- I'm so glad we chose that name, I mean if we'd been high or hanging out with the Yahoos too much we might have wound up with something like "Colon." Eeurgh. So: Ampersand Ellipsis. That's beautiful. But it sounds...I dunno...somehow incomplete. Like she'll always be waiting for something.
– Well, we'll put a period on it, then.
– No. You've got to be kidding, ED! Either it'll sound like she's on the menses straight out of the womb, or -- in England they call it a "full-stop," and that just sounds too much like "he do the police in punctuated voices."
– Okay, what then?
– I guess that's the question everybody's asking right now.
– Eureka!
– What is it?
– Of course! Of course! The strongest, the greatest integrity, fitting with all the principles: that's it that's it that's it!
– My god, what are you talking about?
– I'll tell you later. Here. Let me write the formula out for you. This is good mother's milk.

– &...∆ Ahora y Mañana.

– That sounds just about right. I like that. Whew. So we accomplished something today, at least, even though nobody's getting paid for it. Let's go to sleep.
– Yes. I'm very sleepy all of a sudden. But -- why are you getting into bed like that?
– You mean, all reverse-y, with my feet at your head?
– Dude, they stink! You've been walking around in damp socks all day.
– Look, I could say the same thing about your feet. It looks like you've gone to hell and back in those togs. But something about it just feels right. And besides, I can do............this!
– Ooh.

@ fell asleep then, on the words of Factor Sleepwell, drifting toward the seas, sailing past Raggedy-Ann and Andy, the Boy Bedlam, and the Cheshire cat that flies, like bluebirds, over the rainbows. Then he was hunting dinosaurs with a ray-gun, but instead of "PEW! PEW!" the gun said, in this weird yokely voice, "A rising tide lifts all boats." He groped his way through the underbrush to Constitution Hall where he was invited to take up a quill pen. And he wrote, "If we don't hang together, we'll all hang separately." And then he dreamt:

This.

So how about it, Daddy WarBucks?

In memory of Bryan M. Schneider, who knew a thing or two about spies and dragon-slaying.

&...∆

HBD

Molly Bloom me

KILLROY WUZ HEER

Understanding Arthur Alexander

Nothing kills the enjoyment of music for some people faster than trying to analyze it.  But I’m obsessed with solving the mystery of Arthur Alexander.  His body of work is small.  His songs are musically and lyrically simple, even simplistic.  Almost nobody but the most dedicated music lovers remember his name today.  Yet he was the only songwriter to win pop music’s Triple Crown:  His songs have been covered by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan, arguably the three most respected songwriting acts in rock and roll history.   Dusty Springfield, Ry Cooder, Roger McGuinn, and dozens of others¹sang them too.

I’ve been wondering about these tunes for 45 years now, since I was ten years old.  Maybe I’m getting closer to understanding them, But I’m not there yet.  After all, his chord progressions were basic.  His lyrics seem banal on paper:  “Every day I have to cry some/wipe the water from my eyes some.”  “Oh my name is Johnny Heartbreak …”  “Me and Frank were the best of friends …”  But by at least one objective measure – the artists who covered him – he was the greatest rock songwriter who ever lived.  Subjectively, his best songs are impossible for me to resist as a listener and indescribably rewarding to sing. 

So who the hell was this guy, and what made him so good?

He had a brush with R&B stardom as a singer, but really made his name as a songwriter in the 60’s.  Yet even after the Beatles and Stones covered him he had trouble collecting royalties.  He lived out the next 25 years as a bus driver, interrupted only by one small hit in the 70’s.  Then he then enjoyed a brief comeback in 1993² before dying suddenly.

I was first introduced to Alexander, like many of my generation, by the Beatles’ cover of "Anna." That track is a great reminder that, before he went on his odyssey from musician to activist to martyr to Apple icon, John Lennon was one of the great rock and roll singers.  Alexander’s songs lean to melodrama, and Lennon milks this one for all it’s got.  Alexander’s simple vocal patterns leave singers a lot of room to fill the space, and Lennon's able to pull out tricks Alexander hinted at in his original recording, like the Buddy Holly-ish pseudo-yodels that punctuate the bridge (“oh-oh-oh-oh …”)

That’s one of Arthur Alexander’s secrets:  His lean song structures make them a pleasure to sing.  And his recordings provide suggestions rather than instructions. Where other writers fill every measure with musical and lyrical acrobatics, Alexander’s are spare frames singers can hang their hearts on. 

Emotionally, each song has a story arc.  If you wrote songs using the Syd Field screenwriting method they’d turn out a lot like Alexander’s.  They’re three-minute mini-operas full of conflict and resolution.  Take “You Better Move On,” which the Rolling Stones covered in 1964:  A poor boy’s talking to his wealthier rival, and he humbly admits he can never give his love the good things he wants her to have.  But then he turns on his competitor  … “I’ll never let her go,” he says, "I love so."  Then the air fills with tension.  “I think you better go now,” he says quietly, “I’m getting mighty mad.”  Soft-spokenness can be more menacing than a raised voice, and Arthur Alexander knew that.

Sound corny?  Lame?  Yeah, maybe.  But listen to this cover by Mr. Ironic Distance himself, Randy Newman (before Newman launches into his own “It’s Money That Matters” ):

There’s no distancing in Newman’s performance or Mark Knopfler's accompaniment, no sense of anything but the drama in each moment.  That’s the best thing about Arthur Alexander’s songs:  They’re irony-proof.

The best AA songs underscore their emotional shifts by staying in a pretty narrow melodic range on the verses to build tension, then going much higher on the bridge to increase emotion, and finally going back to the original melody but in a resolved emotional state.  Alexander probably picked up some of these tricks by singing country music.  Singing open-hearted C&W tunes like “I Wonder Where You Are Tonight” probably gave him a feel for these techniques.

But that’s still not the whole story.  What’s missing?

Manfred Clynes might have a clue, but his research is controversial.  Clynes, a classical pianist turned research scientist, believes that musicians who play a composer’s music – even in their heads – reproduce a distinct biological pattern for each composer.  Not for each piece - for each composer.  He goes so far as to say of Rudolf Serkin, one of his test subjects:  “We asked him to think Beethoven, and he would think Mozart.  But we could tell by looking at the printout. So he cooperated, and we got the same shapes. That was probably the most exciting moment of my life."

Is that it?  Is there a neurological “Arthur Alexander signature,” common to all of his work?  Or is it something else?  But Alexander has his share of weak tunes, too, ones that don’t convey the same power.  Where is his signature in songs like “Genie in the Jug”?  (As an aside, I went to school with Manfred Clynes’ kids.  I performed in San Francisco's Coffee Gallery in North Beach with his son Darius in 1971 or so - along with past and future luminaries like Wavy Gravy, Peter Case, and the notorious and flirtatious drag queen who called herself “George.”)

Daniel Levitan’s book The World In Six Songs suggests that one evolutionary role music has played is to convey emotion more accurately than speech.  That could be useful, for example, in convincing a competing tribe that you’re sincere about peace.  Says researcher Ian Cross:  “… let’s imagine the possibility of access to a parallel system of affiliation, unity, bonding.  And … one that conveys an honest signal - a window into the true emotional and motivational state of the communicator.”

Whew.  That’s a lot of academic-sounding verbiage to quote about the guy who wrote “the rain falls around me/loneliness has finally found me/and I’m in the middle of it all.”  But we might be on to something now: sincerity.  Arthur Alexander’s songs come, open-handed and seeking peace, like an emissary from the other side.  I trust their emotion. I have since I was a little boy, and I will until I die.  He couldn’t structure a melody like Stevie Wonder, or write a lyric like Bob Dylan.  But his songs made me trust him.   They made me trust the person singing.  They made me trust the song.

Forget all the analysis:  They made me want to sing.

 _____________________

¹The Internet’s filled with claims that Elvis Presley and the Who also covered Alexander, but that’s wrong.  As far as I can tell they covered songs that Alexander sang but didn’t write.  You just can't trust that Internet ...

²A collection of Arthur Alexander tracks recorded around this time, Lonely Just Like Me (Halftone), is one of the best introductions to his work. 

JOHN PEEL DAY

October 13th 2005 is the date of the the first John Peel Day. The BBC has put up a tribute website that includes information about events around the UK including concerts, radio broadcasts and events.

Music Without Magic

From The Wislon Quarterly:

Schubert’s song may well be the most beautiful thank-you note anyone has ever written, but it’s also something else. It’s a credo, a statement of faith in the wondrous powers of music, and by its very nature an affirmation of those powers. But just how does our gracious Art exercise these powers? How does it comfort us, charm us, kindle our hearts? We might start our search for answers by positing two fundamentals: a fundamental pain and a fundamental quest. A fundamental pain of our human condition is loneliness. No surprise here: We’re born alone, we’re alone in our consciousness, we die alone, and, when loved ones die, we’re left alone. And pain itself, including physical pain, isolates us and makes us feel still more alone, completing a vicious circle. Our fundamental quest—by no means unrelated to our aloneness and our loneliness—is the quest for meaning, the quest to make sense of our time on earth, to make sense of time itself.

Where does music come in?

More here.

Critical Digressions: Dispatch from Karachi

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

We have touched down in Karachi and are reacquainting ourselves with the city through rituals that we religiously repeat every six months: in the afternoon, we get into our ‘97 Corolla, turn up the AC, turn on FM 89 (that plays Duran Duran's "Wild Boys" and "Taste of Summer" back to back with Nazia Hassan and our new generations of rockers, Noori, EP and Jal), pick up a copy of the Friday Times from our man at PIDC (who asks us how we've been and inquires about the political climate in the US), drop our dry-cleaning at the Pearl, get a shave and olive oil massage at Clippers (where we are informed of the reflexology treatment that they have recently introduced), get a beer for the road at the Korean restaurant (which nestles between our legs), and then by the evening, meander through Saddar, passed paan-wallahs, underwear-wallahs, open-air gyms, tea houses, Empress Market, the Karachi Goan Association building, to get a shirt altered, buy some DVDs (Carlito’s Way, Aurat Raj and Disco Dancer), and have fresh falsa juice as the sun warms our back and the sea breeze wafts through the city, portending the monsoon. On Thursday nights we will attend qawwalis at moonlit tombs of saints, on Friday nights we will attend the rollicking Fez disco at the Sind Club, on Saturdays, head to Burns Road for a plate of killer nihari (a hot, soupy dish prepared with calves' calves), and on Sunday, chat with old friends over Famous Grouse and Dunhills about the way things are and will be. Here, we are ourselves and we are alive.

William Dalrymple, however, an insightful commentator on India, writes, "Karachi is the saddest of cities...a South Asian Beirut." The analogy, of course, is incorrect. Looking at a map of Karachi he writes, "The pink zone in the east is dominated by the Karachi drug mafia; the red zone to the west indicates the area noted for the sophistication of its kidnapping and extortion rackets; the green zone to the south is the preserve of those specializing in sectarian violence." Ladies and gentlemen, we have lived in Karachi and can tell you with great certainty that this take on Karachi is facile. It is as if we were passing through New York in the early '90s and were to comment: New York is today’s Sodom. Down Atlantic Avenue, across Brooklyn, in areas such as Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick, and Brownsville, gang warfare and the crack epidemic have transformed traditionally middle-class cantons into a no-man’s land. Bullet holes and crushed needles mark and mar desolate facades and streets. But urban decay is not simply a peripheral phenomenon. In Manhattan, whether north or south, Harlem and Manhattan Alley or Hell’s Kitchen and the Bowery, ethnic warfare plays out on the streets: Blacks, Hispanics, Irishmen, Italians, Chinese pitted against each other, daggers drawn.

Dalrymple has written a number of brilliant books on India (and lives there) but neither his view on Karachi nor ours of New York is complete and consequently, is inaccurate. There is more to New York than bullets and needles. But Karachi gets short shrift: outside observers are able to reduce Karachi to a few facts and artifacts. Since we don’t control our own discourse, others are able define, in fact, redefine the city, see what they want to see. Take Tim McGirk’s ludicrous article in Time in which he perceived Karachi through the eyes of a “hit-man.” That’s like perceiving Los Angeles through the eyes of a 7th Street Crip! This variety of analysis is not only poor but wrong. Karachi’s murder rate, in fact, is at par with Delhi’s (and DC's). And in Bombay, mobsters not only run the movie industry but become politicians and politicians stir murder and champion rape! Of course, Bombay is not merely the sum of squalid facts. Neither are other megacities like Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Lagos and Jakarta (even Lahore), although they share many similar problems.

The problem with reportage is not simply one of dominant discourse but of the news infrastructure in this part of the world. Unlike other cities, Karachi (and indeed all of Pakistan), is typically covered from another country: the South Asian bureaus of major newspapers are based in Delhi. Naturally, then, the worldview of reporters like Barry Bearak, Celia Dugger, David Rhode and Amy Waldman (all of whom, incidentally, can't hold a candle to the knoweldgeable Dalrymple) are colored by local prejudice. On the other hand, former US Consul General John Bauman, an insider – somebody who has lived in Karachi for many years, not just passing through on a ten day junket – says “there are so many good things being done in this city. The city is a lot more complex than the single image people get in the United States.”

Take our word for it: Karachi is wonderfully vibrant. There are dimensions of Karachi not often appreciated by outside observers (foreign reporters and disgruntled expatriates alike): Karachi's vibrant cultural life comprises open-air pop concerts, classical dance shows, art exhibits, independent film festivals and coffee houses; there is great dining, street-side or indoors, and a throbbing nightlife. Karachi is very similar to New York; the same frenetic rhythms beat under our feet.

I Want My Hyphenated-Identity MTV

From The New York Times:

Azhar Usman, 29, with his knitted skullcap and full beard, presented somewhat differently. An MTV executive, he explained, had recruited him, saying: "We're going to redefine the identity of the MTV host. It doesn't have to be someone sexy and good-looking." A comedian (and lawyer) from Chicago, Mr. Usman used the audition to invent an exaggeratedly accented (and quite amusing) character: Vijay the V.J.

"My uncle in India says desi stands for 'doctors earn significant incomes.' My relatives in Pakistan say desi means 'Don't ever say India.' Here on MTV, desi means South Asian flavor, style and music. Check this new video out. It's going to knock your socks off. You've heard of a big production budget. How about 500 backup dancers? This is like 'Grease' meets desi, making it ...greasy. No, that doesn't sound right. People think in my country everybody so sad, crying, terrorism," Vijay said. "We not terrorism, we dancing. Not dancing like panties falling down .... What is this panties falling down" the buttocks?

More here.

Music Without Magic

From The Wilson Quarterly:

Music is both a balm for loneliness and a powerful, renewable source of meaning—meaning in time and meaning for time. The first thing music does is banish silence. Silence is at once a metaphor for loneliness and the thing itself: It’s a loneliness of the senses. Music overcomes silence, replaces it. It provides us with a companion by occupying our senses—and, through our senses, our minds, our thoughts. It has, quite literally, a presence. We know that sound and touch are the only sensual stimuli that literally move us, that make parts of us move: Sound waves make the tiny hairs in our inner ears vibrate, and, if sound waves are strong enough, they can make our whole bodies vibrate. We might even say, therefore, that sound is a form of touch, and that in its own way music is able to reach out and put an arm around us.

One way we are comforted when we’re lonely is to feel that at least someone understands us, knows what we’re going through. When we feel the sympathy of others, and especially when we feel empathy, we experience companionship—we no longer feel entirely alone. And strangely enough, music can provide empathy. The structure of music, its essential nature—with many simultaneous, complex, overlapping, and interweaving elements, events, components, associations, references to the past, intimations of the future—is an exact mirror of the psyche, of the complex and interwoven structure of our emotions. This makes it a perfect template onto which we can project our personal complexes of emotions. And when we make that projection, we hear in music our own emotions—or images and memories of our emotions—reflected back. And because the reflection is so accurate, we feel understood. We recognize, and we feel recognized. We’re linked with the composer of the music by our common humanity. And if a composer has found a compelling way to express his or her own emotions, then to a certain extent that composer can’t really avoid expressing, and touching, ours as well.

More here.

Tis the season for loads of crap Christmas records

We are inundated at the same time every year with tired retreads of otherwise joyous music from mildly talented popstars and/or would be adult-contemporary crooners. If you, like me, are finding yourself just-not-satisfied with, say, Jessica Simpson's latest contribution to this merry pile of garbage, here's a few suggestions...

1. John Denver & The Muppets: A Christmas Together: If you have kids, treat yourself and them to this record. They will remember you for it as they put you in a rest home.

2. Harry Connick Jr.: When My Heart Finds Christmas: An adult-contemporary crooner worth his weight in scotch & soda, Harry brings his showmanship and candor to these carols. And not without it's softer side, the album features a lovely rendition of Ave Maria.

3. Vince Guaraldi Trio: A Charlie Brown Christmas: Rightfully a holiday (and jazz) classic that never goes away. One second your tapping your foot to "Linus and Lucy", the next your caught up in the reverent melancholy of "Christmas Time Is Here".

4. Handel's Messiah: Christmas time, Old Testament-style. Full of drama, fire and brimstone, the Messiah is epic in or out of the context of the bible.

Happy holidays from 3 Quarks. Fa la la la...

New Iron & Wine EP due in February

Mr. Sam Beam of Iron and Wine prepares to add another EP to his rapidly expanding catalog. Entitled Woman King and scheduled for release via Sub Pop on February 22nd, the disc will contain six brand new songs-- his first recordings since Our Endless Numbered Days.

Here, have a tracklisting.

01 Woman King
02 Jezebel
03 Grey Stables
04 Freedom Hangs Like Heaven
05 In My Lady's House
06 Evening on the Ground (Lilith's Song)

More here

The Arcade Fire: Funeral

The title of The Arcade Fire's debut Lp, while not in reference to the music, is meant literally. In the months leading up to recording, bandmember Regine Chassagne's grandmother passed away. Less than a year later Win and William Butler's grandfather died and bandmate Richard Parry's aunt the following month. In the liner notes you'll find their dedication towards the bottom of the second page, a total of nine names arranged beneath it. It is presumably for them, the dearly departed, that the album earned it's austere title, Funeral. In contrast to the dark themes and melancholy that could mire an album made during such a period of loss, Funeral bristles with life. It is the sound of six young souls raging against the dying of light and it is one of the most exciting records of the year.

The Arcade Fire's Official Website
A full review of Funeral at Pitchfork

The Verve: This Is Music

The Verve never made much sense in the context of Britpop. From 1993-97 British music was dominated by the Gallagher brother's laddish buffoonery, Damon Albarn's pretty mug and wit, Jarvis Cocker's working class escapist anthems, and Thom Yorke's barbed melancholy. During this period The Verve were creating moody rock'n'roll full of soul, darkness and light. Their final and seminal album, Urban Hymns, was released just a few months after OK Computer and on the same day (August 26, 1997, the day Britpop died) as Oasis' third record. The Verve lasted long enough to tour in support of Urban Hymns, but would officially break up soon after.

This Is Music: The Singles 92-98 is their first official release in five years and features two new tracks. The compilation culls together songs from their three full-lengths, as well as their first single, "All In The Mind". The songs are as good today as they were years ago, although this album only tells half the story. The Verve made complete records, they weren't a "singles" band. For a full appreciation start with Urban Hymns and work backwards through A Northern Soul and A Storm In Heaven. If only to gain a cursory understanding of one of the great and too-often-overlooked bands of the '90's, this will do.

Click here to view a full review of the album at Pitchforkmedia.com

Tamil Refugee climbing the British charts

This week's New Yorker has a piece on Maya Arulpragasam (aka M.I.A.), the Sri Lankan Tamil Londoner, whose singles have been rising on the British charts. 

"[M]ost of what you find in the world-music section tends toward the gentle, melodious, and uplifting, as if the world were that way.  The music of Maya Arulpragasam, a twenty-seven-year-old Sri Lankan Tamil who moved to England when she was nine and performs under the name M.I.A., is not like that. Anyone who has trolled through bins on Canal Street for videos of kung-fu movies or reggae mix tapes will recognize M.I.A.’s first single, 'Galang' (2003), as an example of actual, on-the-ground world culture: synthetic, cheap, colorful, staticky with power. The beat is shuffling and abrasive, made from what sounds like the by-products of some other, more polite song. It most resembles Jamaican dancehall patterns, but with a twist. Alongside the beat runs a distressed motif that may have been a melody before it was Xeroxed fifteen times. The lyrics combine the exhortations of dancehall ('London calling and speak the slang now, boys say wa, go on girls say wa wa'), the embattled war mentality of American hip-hop . . ."

The article mentioned her song "Sunshowers" which took a melody from one of my recent favorites, "Sunshower" by Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band.  So I went in search and found it on her website.  Pretty damn good; check it and the rest out.